The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
In image guided medical and surgical procedures, images, obtained either preoperatively or intraoperatively (i.e., prior to or during a medical or surgical procedure), are used to aid a doctor in guiding a surgical instrument. Computer assisted image guided medical and surgical navigation systems are known and are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,383,454 to Bucholz; U.S. Pat. No. 5,891,034 to Bucholz; U.S. Pat. No. 5,851,183 to Bucholz; U.S. Pat. No. 5,871,445 to Bucholz; PCT Application No. PCT/US 94/04530 (Publication No. WO 94/24933) to Bucholz; PCT Application No. PCT/US 95/12984 (Publication No. WO 96/11624) to Bucholz et al.; and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/623,956 to Foley et al., the entire disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference.
In general, these image guided systems use images of a body part or other surgical object, obtained from a scan, such as CT or MRI scan, taken before surgery to generate images on a display screen during surgery. The images of the body are correlated with a synthesized image of a surgical instrument and are used to produce, on a display screen, a real-time representation of the surgical instrument used by a surgeon with respect to the body. Prior to the scan of the body to produce body images, markers such as fiducial scanning markers are placed on the parts of the body to be scanned in order to produce fiducial image points on the scanned part of the body. The locations of the fiducial markers represented on the scanned image are correlated with the fiducial scanning markers on the body to provide a coordinate registration to be used by the computer system in determining the relative location of the various objects that the computer tracks. The surgical instrument is also registered with respect to the fiducial scanning markers, as known to those skilled in the art, by positioning the surgical instrument at each of scanning markers and recording the relative location of the instrument and markers.
During surgery, the relative locations of the body part being examined and the surgical instruments are displayed on a display screen of the computer system by detecting the location of tracking markers on the instruments or body. An array of sensors, such as cameras, are used to track the location of the tracking markers, which in turn are interpreted by the computer system to produce images on the display screen that correspond to the positions of the body part and surgical instruments. Such tracking markers can include, for example, LED arrays mounted on the body part and on an instrument.